Eyes
by crackinthecup
Summary: 'He was in a bed that should have felt familiar, and the jeweled fingers that cupped his cheek should have felt familiar too.' Celebrimbor attempts to comfort Maeglin out of the clutches of a nightmare. In retrospect, Maeglin should have known that the nightmare would be just about to start. Fallen Banners, with a side dish of Angbang. Warnings inside.


**A/N:** Warnings for implications of torture (as well as non-con, just to be on the safe side) and psychological warfare.

Dedicating this to justarandomfangirlsstuff on Tumblr as an insanely belated birthday present 3

* * *

Maeglin woke to a voice calling him by name, in a tongue crisp behind his heart, crisp as leaves pressed between heavy pages. Little as it took to conjure thoughts of her, in the cotton-filled fuzz between sleep and waking he found himself hoping that somehow, by chance or curse, she would be there when his eyelids struggled out of drowsiness. He thought of how she had used to glide along the Square of the Folkwell, rippling a laugh across the navy depths of the pool as her fingers stretched for a floating leaf; she might huddle by the water still, smiling her cares to the clouds, eternal in another world. But bright as her memory burned, brightest of all, it could only devour itself here, in his black pit, ruptured even from the merriment of Angband's halls far above.

The voice murmured again. It was not her voice.

"Lómion? Can you open your eyes?" And there was touch too, a brush of fingers out of nothingness, and it was not nothingness anymore.

He was in a bed that should have felt familiar, and the jeweled fingers that cupped his cheek should have felt familiar too. He had a keen sense of the air, the single clear feature of his dream—it had to be a dream, for the darkness would always be there, waiting for him to slot back in like he had never belonged anywhere else. Freshness wafted in through the window, slit open as it was, a cool mountain freshness that trilled to the bone. Maeglin could breathe again.

"You were having a nightmare," Celebrimbor was explaining, and curiously Maeglin curled his fingers round his wrist, prompting the caress of a thumb up his cheekbone; it was both palliative and encouragement, and despite the chill knifing at his heart, Maeglin leaned into the warmth of Celebrimbor's palm. A pallid gleam against golden flesh, Maeglin's fingers struck—his hands looked like they had never been bloodied; yet beneath the skin, delving into bone, the mocking permanence of rock still scratched.

"A nightmare," Maeglin repeated, and his tongue seemed to have little say in flicking the words out—they welled in a voice he might once have deemed his own, from a place he now recognized only as if through a sheet of glass.

Celebrimbor nodded, fingers slipping from Maeglin's cheek to latch in quiet protectiveness onto his hand. ''You're safe now,'' he promised, tightening his grip; Maeglin could not quite bring himself to squeeze back.

Numbness brought the stillness of a snowfall to his mind; gelid death glimmering so daintily. It had been a nightmare. Maeglin allowed the darkness—he allowed _her_ —to recede to a shadow and a hunger, corralled into the back of his mind.

"Letting the images spill into words might ease your burden," Celebrimbor offered and though his voice was soft, a length of rope gingerly handed to Maeglin so that he might not drown—something within Maeglin jarred like the clang of crockery; it smashed and rained into prickling splinters, and the discomfort embedded into his insides, prodding him into an instinctive twitch of a shift across the sheets, away from Celebrimbor. _  
_  
 _No_ , he did not say. Should he speak of hissing silence, of the void that gouged out his eyes, of the scrape of rock against the phalanx of his finger as he clawed at the walls of his pit and accomplished nothing? He turned his head upon the pillow, frowning up into silver eyes—silver, not the blue his mind had turned to; silver ringed with writhing light, and Maeglin squinted, unsure; but then a cloud soaked up the sun and the silver in Celebrimbor's eyes glistered like perfect polished steel once more.

Maeglin shook his head, and was thankful that Celebrimbor did not move to hold him; for deep, deep down, nameless fear still huddled, shivering as the memory of gold-clad fingers pulsed with ensorcelled potency; hurt they had inflicted, gleefully the lieutenant had toyed with him beneath his master's fathomless gaze, yet less it had been than the injury of that whetted tongue.

With worry Celebrimbor peered at him, clasping his hand yet more firmly, chafing life back into his limp fingers. "Beloved—"

 _"Beloved," the lieutenant crooned as the very shadows moiling around his master near purred in sick delight. "Beloved, he called you, and what a gift it must have been. One of Fëanáro's line of crownless kings has given you his heart, and how easily you now crush it failing to the floor."_

 _"You lie!" Maeglin spat, despairing, yet a second too long the lieutenant's laughter shimmered upon the air, ringing golden and scalding. "I – He never—"_

 _"_ Hasn't _he?" the Maia pressed, and in fickle amusement flicked his nipple with the blade of the dagger poised so delicately in his claws. It was calculated torment, for the skin did not break; yet distress scraped angry and crimson across his flesh, and as the movement was repeated, Maeglin whined in the terror of his helplessness—immobilized as he was, strapped hand and foot to a wooden plank tilted at an angle, he could do naught but endure._

 _"Nay," his master declared from within the churn of darkness. "I sense that he speaks true. How disgusting are the ways of the Quendi, how pitiful their_ fëar _in malleability, rippling like water from a mere word, sweetly spoken and little meant. Your perception is not amiss, Mairon, for his spirit is cracked, tainted, shriveled—but not yet from love.'' And out of shadow the Vala spun himself into physicality, coalescing into malevolence that strangled the very will, and his nails latched to Maeglin's cheeks in an upward rip of the Elf's head. With no other choice, up Maeglin looked and into Morgoth's eyes._

 _It was a queer sensation, and an unhinging one; for ranged round the pupils the irises were as intermingling shards of ice, a deep, fractured blue which trapped light in perpetual, thrashing agony. Maeglin felt himself trapped too, caged, throttled into frigid, trackless wastes. An eternal wanderer, ever cold, never dying. He would have screamed with the horror of his mind, what felt like cerebral tissue squashed and centrifuged, the tattoos on his own fingers obscured beneath ruined biology as he rummaged for the very worst, truths and lies mashed into indistinguishable madness—he would have screamed, had_ fëa _not quailed and every sinew of his_ hröa _crumpled as the Moringotto sneered and all but threw him away._

 _"Deal with him however you will, Mairon," the lord said to his lieutenant, a brush of lips all too intimate down the jawline. "Love may yet break him." And small though the word was, upon Morgoth's tongue it accrued all the inevitability of a corpse._

 _"I am ever your servant," the Maia preened and oh—how sickeningly bright he glowed beneath his master's grin. And then the Vala was gone, and in the thinning of the air that followed Maeglin could breathe a little easier—a mistake._

 _"Lómion," the lieutenant cooed, of a sudden suffocatingly close. "Maeglin you are called in the tongue out of darkness. Shall we not deliver you back to darkness, then, lost and blind, scrambling through affairs too great for your imagining?" Maeglin had not the energy to struggle when too-warm hands reached for him, scratched and plied up his cheeks, strapping his forehead to the wood. "You do have such pretty eyes," Mairon mused, half to himself, a craftsman's sigh gusting in his voice; then he turned away, striding to a workbench crowded off to the side, and the tap-tap-tap clamoring across it set Maeglin's teeth on edge._

 _Tap-tap-tap, as the Maia returned with a slender metal rod clipped between his fingers, a hollow cylinder crowned with jagged teeth protruding from its other end. Maeglin made to shimmy away with a whine, a word of protest, but meticulously, with gentleness rendered obscene in the pleased hum radiating from him, the lieutenant caught the flutter of his eyelid beneath the tip of his finger, pinning his eye open. But where his master sapped and invaded and pummeled to bended knee, the Maia's power prickled through his blood vessels, curled like thorns into his muscles, until in the end his body failed him; Maeglin could only scream as the lieutenant positioned the circular saw, and in screams the memory deafened and died._

 _Beloved_ —so Celebrimbor had said, and now the word smeared over his lips once again as he gentled Maeglin away from the memory of the atrocities planted within his flesh. (The lieutenant had excised his cornea; in truth Maeglin did not know whose tissue had been stitched back in; he knew only the cadence of the Maia's voice, like stifling wind across arid lands— _rejoice, Elfling, for so graciously I have afforded you a fresh perspective_. _)_

Maeglin gazed, but he was not gazing at Celebrimbor; he felt the callused fingers so earnestly wrapped around his own as no more than a shackle. This was no dream at all; Maeglin did not dream anymore.

''Ah, you see now, do you not, son of Eöl?'' Celebrimbor was puffing hotly down his neck, and though Celebrimbor's lips shaped the words, it was not his voice breathing life into them; too resonant it was, peppering faint traces of effulgence in the air; and as its primeval power hummed alien and languid in his bones, Maeglin shut his eyes—it was the welcome of the hopeless, the savage satisfaction of returning to find misery the single constant. He should have known. The creature resumed his speech, drawling through a silvered smile: ''You have let us take your eyes, as you shall let us take your city—as you shall let us take _him_.''

In silence Maeglin shrouded himself, trammeled the beating ache of his heart within a capsule of rock. He said nothing, even as the creature persisted, low and inexorable as though he were dictating the chords of time.

''One would be forced to conclude that you do not love him. You have been informed of the consequences of your refusal to cooperate, and amply so. Would you see him mounted upon a pole, a banner to your infidelities? He might even surrender himself willingly, for love of you.''

Maeglin crushed his response beneath his tongue. Bountiful practice he had had, within the wheeling darkness of Nan Elmoth; for beneath leaves dark and glossy, far, far away from the solitary glare of light haunting now this window, now that, his mother pacing her thoughts across the floorboards, his silence had marked him companion to boulder and stream and muted leaves.

And so it was with ease, when ease would be abhorred, that Maeglin heard the creature's words and offered no reply. Ever so slowly, subtle displeasure began to bristle beneath the creature's façade, and with the gold upon his fingers bubbling into searing heat, the Maia wound a hand around Maeglin's neck. ''Pain and promises we have plied,'' he breathed, more to himself than to Maeglin, seemingly absorbed in worrying a fingernail down Maeglin's carotid. ''Would you see yourself shattered, see us savage all you hold dear before you deign to bend?''

Maeglin's throat worked to swallow, and he felt the edge of the creature's nail slice a half-moon into his skin. Yet Maeglin's own tremulous inhalation was subsumed as the Maia near gasped with a sudden thought. It was a sound unstable with delight, thickening in malice, an animalistic purr as silver eyes bled triumphant gold into the sclera: ''Nay, you all break the same. I hear tell that in truth you are your father's son. And yet more has reached my ears, Lómion, and my eyes also, for wantonly indeed you display your depravity. Your thought is bent upon another—is that not so? Fair, so word of her has wafted over the lands; and wise as well, in sensing the darkness clogging your heart. Tell me—''

And it was Celebrimbor's hands that rolled him onto his back, ever warm and ever callused; it was Celebrimbor's teeth tearing at his pulse point, and as a stone Maeglin toppled, plummeting into the mattress as though it were the damp soil of a grave. Yet though he tried, he could not remain a stone; for he had expected this to scathe from Celebrimbor's lips; had dreaded it all the more as he tottered yet closer to Celebrimbor, had dreaded the syllables of her name spat burning and painful, or worse—quiet, a question that was not question at all, the realization of the end. And now terror howled within Maeglin as for a moment the gold in the Maia's eyes was subdued into star-bright silver; he would have struck the creature, dashed him to the floor along with the poison of his syllables, had it not been for the certainty that bruises would seep across Celebrimbor's flesh instead.

The creature coiled away, dropping golden skin and dark hair into alabaster and flame. ''Tell me,'' he persevered, and even as the illusion of the bedchamber unraveled into swirls of blackness, in Maeglin's tunneling vision he seemed radiant as a gift-god, ''what would you give to have her?''


End file.
